I
Our study is concerned with the “sacred” dance; that this epithet applied to the dance, at any rate during the earlier phases of its history and as still practised among many uncultured and even some semi-cultured peoples to-day, is more than justified, the following pages will, it is hoped, show.
Its extreme importance in the eyes of early man, who regarded it as indispensable at all the crises of life—initiation, puberty, marriage, burial—who used it as one of the essentials in worship, who saw in it a means of propitiating whatever supernatural powers he believed in, a means of communion with the deity, a means of obtaining good crops, fruitful marriages, and of communicating with the departed—to mention only its more important uses, shows that it is a subject worth investigating though the domain it occupies is but a modest one in the great sphere of the history of Religion.
Probably one of the most instructive first-hand pieces of information which we have on the subject is contained in the answers given to Chalmers in reply to questions which he addressed to some natives of New Guinea. He asked “What does the dance signify?” and he got two replies from the natives of the two most important districts of this big island respectively; the first ran thus:
When they dance all the spirits rejoice, as do all the people. When dancing, all food grows well; but when not dancing, food grows badly. No drums are beaten uselessly [the drum-beating is the invariable accompaniment to dancing, one implies the other]. When anyone dies drums are beaten to comfort friends.
The second was this:
Drum-beating and dancing are a sign of rejoicing and thanksgiving, in order that by so doing there may be a large harvest. If the dancing is not given there will be an end to the good growth; but if it is continued, all will go well. People come in from other villages and will dance all night. There will be several feasts during the time, and each leader of the dance will pray and thank the spirits for the good harvest.
Among other questions he also asked: “Is there any useless dancing?” and the two replies were: “No, the drum is never beaten uselessly”; and: “Dances are never merely useless[1].”
The study of the subject brings out without a shadow of doubt that these answers illustrate what were, and still are to a great extent, the beliefs held in regard to the sacred dance by numbers of peoples in an undeveloped stage of culture. It is a good illustration of what, within a circumscribed area, holds good of the wider study of religions in general, that, as Farnell has so well put it,
all through the present societies of savage men there prevails an extraordinary uniformity, in spite of much local variation, in ritual and mythology, a uniformity so striking as to suggest belief in an ultimately identical tradition, or, perhaps more reasonably, the psychologic theory that the human brain-cell in different races at the same stage of development responds with the same religious speech or the same religious act to the same stimuli supplied by its environment[2].
A survey over the whole field produces the conviction that the stimuli which, in its beginnings, induced the sacred dance appear to have been what we should now describe as the two prime spiritual and material needs, respectively, of man, viz. the response to his “god,” and the obtaining of food. To early savage man it was not, of course, a god as we understand the word, nor yet even as it would have been understood for millenniums among uncivilized men in remote ages; we merely use the word as a convenient term for expressing a supernatural power, or powers, at first vague, impersonal, “mana[3],” or something of that kind; at any rate, some power beyond the ken of man, of whose existence he had no doubt whatsoever, and to which he was impelled to respond to the best of his very feeble powers. Why he should have chosen this form of response (we are not contending that it was the only form) is a difficult, perhaps an impossible, question to answer, though we shall make the attempt to do so (see pp. 15 ff.); but that he did choose this form all the available evidence goes to show. That the sacred dance should have been believed to be the means of obtaining food is less difficult to understand when one remembers the universal belief in the efficacy of imitative magic among uncivilized men. The natives of New Guinea dance as a means of obtaining a good harvest; but there is evidence for the presumption that early man did the same thing for obtaining food long before harvests existed.
As a means of response to supernatural powers the dance was obviously a sacred act; but the epithet may also be applied, though perhaps in a modified way, to the dance as a means of obtaining food; for the belief in the existence of supernatural powers once attained, the conviction of their intrusion into all the affairs of life would naturally follow, as indeed we know to have been the case. But this implies that savage man believed that these supernatural powers were, in some sense, the givers of food; and this is hardly compatible with the idea that the dance as an act of imitative magic was the means of procuring food—an idea which is abundantly proved by the evidence to exist. If an act of imitative magic, such as the dance, is ipso facto the means of bringing out what it imitates, how can it be said that supernatural powers have anything to do with the matter? And how can the dance in this case be called sacred? It is a question, however, whether there was not a subconscious intention of setting in motion the “machinery” which brought about the thing imitated every time an act of imitative magic was performed. By the “machinery” we mean the active intervention of supernatural powers in an undefined, mysterious way. In this case the dance as a means of obtaining food would likewise be, strictly speaking, a sacred act.
However this may be, there is a large consensus of opinion that the dance in its origin was sacred, and that every other subsequent form of dance was ultimately derived from this. It is true to say that “the ritual or worship dance is the source of all others[4].” One of the earliest modern writers on the subject, de Cahusac, likewise says: “Aussi la danse sacrée est-elle la plus ancienne, et la source dans laquelle on a puisé dans les suites toutes les autres[5].” This point is particularly emphasized because it is only the dance in its sacred aspect that will be dealt with in the following pages.